The collected works of Lana Brindley: writer, speaker, blogger

linux.conf.au 2015 – Day 3

Started out in Marco Ostini’s security talk, where he scared the pants off us all. Like we weren’t all paranoid enough by default. Then the scaring-the-pants-off-us theme continued with Leslie Hawthorne discussing patent trolls.

After lunch, I headed over to the big lecture hall to hear Brenda Wallace talk about the Christchurch earthquake response, which was incredibly fascinating. I recall when the earthquake hit, and I (sitting in my very safe house, in my very safe street, a very long way away) was glued to Twitter for days watching the crisis response unfold, including the amazing work of the Catalyst team and volunteer army. It was great to get more insight into what was really going on.

Then it was off to hear Leslie Hawthorne’s amazing talk on privilege. There’s a whole heap more blog posts and thoughts in there that I need to unpack a bit more yet, but for the record here are the five experiments Leslie wanted us all to try:

Experiment 1: Change your speech defaults (gay, crazy, lame, guys, like a girl)
Experiment 2: Listen to people who aren’t like you (socmed. #notallmen)
Experiment 3: Change your online persona (woman, PoC, person of size)
Experiment 4: Speak up for others (recenter convos, bring convo back to people ignored or interrupted, use respect)
Experiment 5: Ask for help and accept it humbly (apologise sincerely when you make a mistake)

Where the bloody hell are ya?!

Who wrote all this stuff?

All writing on this blog is the work of Lana Brindley and does not necessarily reflect the view of Rackspace, OpenStack, or any other group with which I am affiliated, except where I have used direct quotes (which are attributed to the original authors where possible). All images were either taken by me, shared under their individual licencing requirements, or obtained as stock photography.